Got to see “Hidden Figures” over the weekend. This weekend, of all weekends – both the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr., and the last weekend that a rational thinker will be in the executive office, at least for a while.

The movie, by the way, is better than flawless. It shows, it doesn’t tell, a very important story, without preaching or swelling up the “triumph of the human will” music. Because as much as this movie is about triumph, and as much as it is very much a feel-good movie, there is also something profoundly sad behind it – and that is that it has a story to tell at all. And it has several.

First, the story, focusing on three black female pioneers at NASA, very matter-of-factly reminds us how straight-up awful it was to be African-American, how deeply ingrained the Jim Crow laws were (separate library books – where there weren’t separate libraries). This was during my lifetime, but early in it, and it’s easy for those details to slip from memory. Being Northern, we tend to shake it off more and forget there were plenty of iniquities up here as well (redlining, anyone?).

And if we like to think that’s all a comfortable distance in the mirror (and it’s not), add to that the challenges the subjects faced as women, and women in science. Both my daughters deal with the fact that they are still very much in the minority in their programs. Engineering programs are up to 18-20 percent female now, and the old prejudices continue. Both have gone to schools led by women, which has barely had an effect, and both have seen continuing institutional and cultural bias that affects how they are perceived, how they are able to participate, and what it is considered acceptable for them to do.

So while the movie featured some fabulous portrayals by seriously talented actresses (and the supporting cast, with an exercise in understatement by Kevin Costner), I couldn’t help but think how sad and stupid and wrong all this was and is. Why would we deny the best and brightest because of their skin color or gender? Why is that even “our” option? So much wasted human potential, lost to us forever, because blacks couldn’t attend courses in a white school, because women shouldn’t be doing math (their tender reproductive systems might suffer). We have chosen to hobble ourselves, in order to . . . what?

Growing up in the ’60s, when the idea was that we would overcome all these unfounded prejudices and hatreds, it just seemed like it was a matter of time. Rights were gained, laws were passed, and it seemed like by now we would be past most of this. It certainly did not seem like we would be riding a resurgent wave of crazed, open racism. I’d like to say the same for misogyny but there wasn’t even the same pretense with regard to women’s rights by those who oppose them. Whether it’s unjust rates of incarceration or forced unnecessary ultrasounds, I can’t imagine thinking this would still be happening.

So, yes, “Hidden Figures” is a note-perfect motion picture, and one of the rare important movies that doesn’t feel like a homework assignment. Its portrayals are supremely human and real (as were the performances in director Theodore Melfi’s previous feature, “St. Vincent”), and it’s supremely entertaining. As sad as the conditions at the time were for the people affected by them, I couldn’t help but feel a strong stirring of nostalgia for one aspect of the culture the movie portrayed, the culture I grew up in – a culture that valued, praised, and celebrated science. A culture that took pride in advancements . . . in moving forward, not backward.

Truly. I once had a great memory. What happened to that? Is it just age, or stress, or just too damn many years and things to remember (which, of course, would be age)? Not clear. But it is true, I once remembered things that had happened not only to me but to those around me. I had a great knack for knowing the events of certain years. Increasingly, I’m finding myself unclear when things happened or if they happened at all.

A case in point came in in a recent somewhat minor family argument over an event from some years ago. Honestly, I’d have struggled to put a year to the event, but I thought I remembered a chunk of the particulars pretty well. Someone else remembered it quite, quite differently, and of course that’s how memory is – faulty, subjective, unreliable. I was pretty clear on my perspective of events, but just the doubt was enough to make me doubt myself. And I carried that doubt around for a week until just now when, through the miracle of my having once been a blogger, I found an account of the event, right here on my very own internet, that told it pretty much the way I remember it. In that case, it turns out, my memory was good (though, again, I could never have said what year it happened).

But while looking for that, I found another entry, one that relayed how I went to, and enjoyed, a movie that, had you asked me twenty minutes ago, I would have sworn I had never seen. With memory now jogged, I can even remember where we went to see it, but without that jog, I’d have denied I ever saw it.

I really think a lot of it has to do with the years, and what was going on during them. There are some pretty big stress-created craters in my timeline, when all I think I was doing was holding it together. The months following 9/11 were a big crater – I remember a huge amount of my work-related activities in those months, but what went on in family life I’m afraid I’ve barely a clue. The years I spent trying to consult independently are also a bit of a blur, in terms of remembering what happened when. I remember the summer of 1989 at a level of detail that I’d probably be able to reconstruct in a calendar – but to remember the years my daughters graduated, I sometimes need to do a little bit of math. Vexing.

Right now, the stress is locked in high, which probably means that in a few years, when I want to remember how it was that these holidays came to be so strange logistically, I’m going to wish I had written it down here. Family obligations have caused some lengthy separation, multiple and concurrent AirBnBs in different cities, car rentals and other goings on that I know I’m going to be confused about in a couple of years. Heck, I’m confused about them now. How did we get to this place? It’s never a straight line.

I generally have a policy against wishing away the days, weeks, months, and years, but 2016 is one I won’t be sorry to see go. Personally, there have been better. While being able to enjoy our first “summer of fun” in some time, having a summer without major construction projects and even sneaking in a vacation, finding new places to bike and paddle, that relaxation was countered by other events.

There were losses in the family, two more empty seats at the Christmas Eve festivity that my mother has put on since somewhere around 1970. It’s more Christmas to me than Christmas itself, particularly now that there are no children in the house, and as the years go on there are just more of us that aren’t there any more. That sense of loss starts to weigh on the soul, and this year it weighed more heavily than in most years.

Family has struggled, too, with health and personal issues causing pain, literal and otherwise, in daughters whose distance I now feel too acutely. Sharing suffering over Skype is something of a miracle, but when we hang up there are still hundreds of miles between us and our children, and the desire to just get in the car and be there is strong (and sometimes that’s what happens).

And then, of course, there’s the whole thing of the country descending into fascism, racism, and some other -isms that I had really thought, when I was growing up in the ‘60s, we’d just be over by now. It seemed like all we needed was time, and eventually the old “set in their ways” people would fall off the conveyor belt into the trash bin of history, and what was left would be a somewhat better world. Instead, we have a huge reactionary element now trying to get back a nation that never existed – it was a construct of the prevailing culture that simply excluded everything that wasn’t it from the official story – while maintaining the myth of American exceptionalism without the messy multi-cultural/immigrant parts of it. So, yes, going into this cowardly old world (because bravery is acceptance of others; this whole reactionary culture is based on fear) in the new year, I’m more than a little concerned. Never been a fan of mob rule, amateur government, or presidents who are proclaimed to be kings. Our nation also used to not be a fan of any of that, but as had always been suspected, all those highly selective constitutional “scholars,” who mostly couldn’t memorize the single amendment they proclaimed the most important, didn’t believe in the document at all. They just believed in leveraging the rule of law against those who do believe in it. And it’s working.

Partly because of all of that, partly because of the ability to be more personally connected through other media, and partly because my other blog, Hoxsie, takes a fair amount of effort, this blog has been mostly silent. I don’t know if it’ll stay that way or not in the coming year. There are things to be said that don’t fit in a Tweet or a Facebook post. There’s a continuity I’d like to maintain with a blog that’s more than a decade old (if not more than a decade full), so I may redouble my efforts here. Or you may get the occasional cryptic photograph.

In any event, if I know you, I wish you the best for the new year. If I don’t know you, I also wish you the same. Be good to other human beings. It’s all we’re here for.

Listen, if you want to have blood drawn by someone who’s never drawn blood before, by all means, have at it. That’s your problem. If you want surgery done by someone who has never done surgery before, that’s also your problem. Go ahead. But if you suggest trucks, buses and planes should be commanded by absolute amateurs, someone else is going to get hurt. And if you want to put the workings of a complex, powerful government in the hands of amateurs, ideologues and worse, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

As someone who tried to faithfully serve the public to the best of my ability for a number of years, who tried to bring reason and logic to my small corner of governing, it has always been painful to watch those who enter government with more personal motives, whether they are ideological or driven toward personal gain. And it has been hard to watch as qualified, dedicated individuals decide to leave public service, or never to enter it, because it has come to be universally disparaged. This will only get worse.

But now, we have decided to put the federal executive branch and the armed services in the charge of an individual who, by any measure, appears to be unstable at best, and who has nothing but contempt for the institutions he is supposed to be in charge of. We haven’t just put a pilot with zero experience behind the yoke – we’ve put in a pilot who hates planes. And everyone associated with planes.

And he’s staffing up with an array of horribles that, prior to his election, no one would have accused him of considering. None would have accused him of thinking of someone who actually leaked secrets to be Secretary of State, when his whole campaign was that Clinton could have exposed secrets. None would have accused him of considering an education secretary with not only no educational experience of any kind, but an absolute hatred for the very system she’s supposed to be put in charge of. None would have accused him of putting an avowed anti-feminist, racist, white supremacist who believes that only property owners should be able to vote in place as his “chief strategist,” because even he could not possibly be that bold. And yet . . .

I’m hearing a lot of “wait and see.” There was an amount of that in 1930s Germany, too, and a lot of accommodation because of the thought that Hitler couldn’t possibly be as bad as his words would indicate. History showed that he meant everything he said, and then some. The thing is, we don’t need to wait to see. It’s happening right now. Racist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT acts are being committed day after day by an emboldened minority unleashing hate. These are not just far-off events or abstractions; these are things that have happened to people I know. We don’t need to stand by while we Make America Germany Again. Let’s not.

So, what does a man of a certain age (let’s just say that getting to double my current age is now at best unlikely, and is likely undesirable) do once the kids are gone, the career is relatively stable, and the house projects are getting complex? Seems like there are two routes for such a man: grow a white beard and become a Civil War fanatic, or finally get more serious about some woodworking. Given a recent explosion of creativity from the spousal unit, which creativity requires not only frames for displays in art galleries but very special frames (oil pastels don’t like to be pressed against glass), I decided to get serious about some finer skills and frame-building. That means getting serious about mitered corners and rabbet joints. It meant finally getting a good router table (you cannot imagine the lengths I have gone to and what I have done without one, and I cannot imagine why that was the case). It means getting some quality router bits and angle guides, and really making sure the saw is dialed in perfectly. It means measure 5 or 6 times, cut once. There is a lot of arithmetic.

The first framing effort, suspending glass away from an oil pastel painting, looked pretty good. Until I saw it in the gallery, and saw everything that was wrong with it. The angles were a little skewed, the miters less than perfect, the staining a bit uneven – all things that would have been hidden by paint, but we went natural and in the end I didn’t love it. The second was a big piece that required plexi instead of glass, and it went better but I still didn’t have my miters quite perfect. The third was better still, and didn’t look embarrassing hung in a gallery. Getting there.

Then we had this painting sitting above the mantel, purchased from a local artist. Just love it, but it came in the most rudimentary of frames and I was sick of looking at it that way. I saw another large piece at a gallery and stole the idea for how it was framed. Knowing I was going to paint the perimeter, and given the size, I went with rabbetted joints, rather than miters, and rabbetted the inlay piece too, made out of some birch that for some reason I’ve had and never used for more than 20 years. This piece came up pretty damned close to perfect. Not quite, but it’s just about at the point that woodworking should be, where only the builder can find the flaws. And it really makes the scene look complete. (Thanks again to the spousal unit, the house actually looks like we decorated it on purpose.)

We have other things I want to be able to build, and that means I’ve spent about three weeks rearranging our tiny, highly-longitudinal basement. Someone recently asked me if I had a woodshop, and I just had to laugh. I have a lot of tools that I have to move into place every time I want to use them. I don’t really even have room for the table saw to sit in place where I would need to use it. It’s on wheels so I can spin it around and fit longer pieces of wood. A new working table, only for assembly, is drying and ready for the legs to be mounted, and a million other things have been rearranged around the basement so that I can have something like a workflow.

Maybe I should just let the whiskers grow and take a drive to Gettysburg.

I’m really dedicated to plowing through the entire works of Shakespeare.

Finally learning piano.

Life, man. Life.

Yeah, it’s that last one. No worries (well, a few here and there). Mostly took the summer off from doing things to my house (which is usually how I spend my summers) to have a dedicated summer of fun, and for the most part, that’s what happened. We went places we’d been meaning to go since moving to this idyllic little corner of the Keystone state. We bought more kayaks than are strictly called for. We ran the living hell out of our air conditioning. We built a garden in the back that is freaking adorable, and kept most of the flowers alive through a dry summer. We visited people, people visited us. We ran screaming from a theater for Blobfest. Art was made, and the frames to put it in. I found some great new cycling routes and got better at riding in heat than I’ve ever been, but still had to beg off most of August for other things and now most of September for work.

And so this, which goes back a long way in terms of sort of chronicling my musings and family life, has taken a serious back burner position, and even my daily dalliance with history has suffered from less frequent attention. It’s just how it is. If I’ve got something pithy to say, I generally say it on the Twitter. That’s all about the pith.

Second year in a row of giving into certain realities with regard to vacation – where we want to be is a long way from here, weather in the Adirondacks is often cruel, we are old and may have spent enough of our lives being wet – and renting a lakeside cottage in the Fulton Chain of Lakes, rather than tenting. Since last year, we’ve had a plan to drive up with an empty kayak rack and go back home with at least one new boat from MountainMan in Old Forge, and to get rid of the monstrously heavy tandem kayak we bought when the kids were little. Just as that plan was being executed, a friend said he’d be selling his super light carbon kayak, which sounded even better to me than some of the boats we’d been researching. With a small side trip to the foothills, we could pick it up on our way north. Long, stiff, and light – I nearly threw it up into the rack. So we went to camp with that and our old faithful tandem canoe, which also isn’t getting any lighter but which we’ve had for 27 years.

Upside of a really efficient touring kayak: it’s really efficient. Downside: the inexperienced kayaker (such as someone who has previously used a wide-open tandem) will quickly become experienced. That means wet. The cockpit is super-tight, so getting in and out requires some special skills, skills that I’m still developing. It’s also super-narrow, which it turns out meant it’s not a good fit for my wife. But once in it . . . paddling is almost zero effort, and control is amazing. So we figured we’d executed the plan for this year: buy one boat, get rid of another, hold onto the two canoes.

Of course, we needed some additional gear, so we ended up at MountainMan anyway, and there got to look over one of the boats we had been planning on looking over. Then we got to sit in it. Then we got to test paddle it. Then we bought another boat, one that much better suits the better half and is still light and quite fast.

For those keeping track, that means we drove up with a wide-ass canoe, and were going back home with that and two more boats. That was asking a lot of my roof rack. Luckily, in one of those weird developments that I never saw coming, we’re now those people whose adult children come to join in on part of the vacation, along with their significant others. That’s delightful, by the way. We had a fire, we paddled together, we watched movies together. But most importantly, one of the daughters conveniently had a kayak rack on her car. So, another side trip on the way home, a borrow of some real estate from my mother to store the canoe for a few weeks, a transfer of one of the new kayaks, and off we went.

So that was this year’s plan – go on vacation, come back with a new boat. By any measure, we overachieved our goal. Along the way, elder daughter became excited/interested in paddling the Adirondack Canoe Classic, and we were probably lucky that the deadline for this year’s event had already passed. By no coincidence, this is an event that has been a goal of mine since the ’80s, and which I’ve never really been in a position to train for or participate in; it’s also one I’ve always had an inkling that I’d love to do with one of my daughters, both of whom have been on the water their entire lives. And now one of them wants to do it. But the level of preparation – make no mistake, this is a serious distance. 90 miles in three days, with 5.25 miles of carry. You carry all your gear (or have a support vehicle meet you at the landings, but it’s all on you). On one of the vacation days, I did a nice eight mile trip (and was only nearly tossed from the boat twice) – so if I could just do four times that distance for three days in a row, I figure I’m all set. I’m scouting training locations now, because that’s a scary commitment.

By the way, first time in years I’ve gotten ready for and gone on vacation without having the old Go-Go’s song “Vacation” get stuck in my head . . . oh, there it is. All is right with the world then.

After years of good intentions but poor execution, of being somewhat nearby but never quite in the right area, I finally made it to the land of my ancestors last week. It’s a little tucked-away corner of the north central Adirondacks, far from any roads in the 1860s and not terribly close to any now. But at that time, the earliest tourists traveled by water routes from one end of the Adirondacks to the other, following routes set out by Seneca Ray Stoddard, Rev. Murray and other early advocates of wilderness adventure in upstate New York. (Remember that Verplanck Colvin wasn’t engaged to make a map of the region until 1872.) And as they paddled (or were paddled) down the Raquette River and came to the carries around the upper and lower Raquette Falls, their boats and gear were carried around the falls on an oxcart driven by my great great great grandfather, Philander Johnson, and they were fed pancakes and something that was acknowledged as trout when in season by my great great great grandmother, “Mother” Johnson.

It’s not entirely clear when they arrived there, though it’s likely it was any time between 1860 and 1865. It’s not entirely clear why they left Newcomb, where they had been tenant farming for a few years, and where their son William remained for a period of time. It’s not at all clear why they and the related families that they moved around with for a couple of decades didn’t move south even just a few dozen miles to a part of the world with shorter winters and soil that could grow something. Together, Johnsons, Pecks, Grahams and some others moved from northern Vermont to Crown Point, then into inland Essex County, making a stop in Newcomb before heading into deep wilderness to seek their fortune where there was none likely to be found.

I’m not quite sure when logging started in that particular neck of the woods, whether it had begun when they got there or whether they were entirely reliant on the little bit of tourism that was starting to build. It seems unlikely they could have made a go of it without a nearby lumber camp to serve, and it seems reasonable they may have gone there to feed the lumberjacks and found a profitable niche providing food and lodging to the big city swells.

Today, the closest paved road (well-packed dirt, anyway) is Coreys Road, which takes you to the head of the Raquette Falls trail (marked as the horse trail). It’s about 4.2 miles of pretty easy hiking (though with an amount of up and down) to reach the clearing where Mother Johnson’s stood. Today, there are two structures there – a nice modernish cabin built in 1975, occupied in the season by a ranger with the Department of Environmental Conservation, and an old, hand-hewn barn that could date back to Mother Johnson’s time. If not, at the very least it is known to have been there in 1890, so not long after.

We hiked in on a day with perfect overcast weather that later brightened up. When we got to the clearing, we met the ranger on the site, Gary Valentine, who has been there a dozen years and knew nearly as much about Mother Johnson as I did . . . which is really no surprise as none of this information has come down from family stories. It was only recently that I became certain that Mother (whose name was Lucy Kimball Johnson) was in fact William Johnson’s mother. Mr. Valentine gave us the grand tour of the new cabin on the site, and let us inspect the barn, marveling at the pinned construction with hand-hewn beams, speculating that it certainly could have been put up by Philander. In fact, he thought it likely, since the first thing new settlers had to build was a barn, not a house, as they would have to care for their livestock in order to survive. We can’t be certain, but it certainly makes sense.

We also talked about whether Mother Johnson was buried at Raquette Falls or somewhere else. The author Christine Jerome, in An Adirondack Passage, held that Mother Johnson had asked to be buried at Long Lake. That’s certainly possible, as it was the closest thing to a town nearby, but it’s also questionable as neither she nor any of the other Johnsons lived there. Her daughter Sylvia lived down the river at Hiawatha Lodge; son William had lived in Long Lake once, but had lived much longer at Coreys, and was by the time of her death likely near Westport, back east by Lake Champlain. There is a headstone at Long Lake that originally said “Old Mrs. Johnson,” then was turned upside down and re-inscribed “Mother Johnson.” But an article on her granddaughter Jennie Morehouse, in 1938, said that both Lucy and Philander were buried at the falls, as was Sylvia’s husband, Clark Farmer. In any event, there is no sign of any graves near the falls. There is a grave in the clearing where her lodge stood, but that is that of George Morgan, for whom a later Raquette Falls Lodge was built.

It was remarkable to sit beside the falls and think of how long people had been coming to that place in the midst of the wilderness, how the early Adirondack guides (including Lucy’s son William and then grandsons Charles and George) would have beached their boats above the upper falls and then hiked in to hail Philander with his ox cart, who would have carried the vessels around the falls while the “sports” enjoyed a meal and often slept over for the night. Likely those guides had to bring some of the supplies the Johnsons needed, such as milled flour, but it would appear that “Uncle” kept the guests in something like trout and “mountain lamb.” Even that early, there were hunting and fishing seasons to maintain the populations up. If, in fact, logging was already underway in that area, deer may have been hard to come by whether in season or not. Perhaps they had ice, but probably not. It was a hard, remote life.

Think of what it took to even build a cabin in those woods. The land had to be cleared – at the time Seneca Ray Stoddard took the photo above, it looks like logging may have already occurred as the standing timber is intermittent. If the Johnsons arrived with the logging operations, then a logging crew may have made their lives much easier. If not, “Uncle” had a lot of work to do, along with whoever else from the families may have gone there with them. Once the timber was felled, it had to be shaped into beams using an adze – evidence of that handiwork remains in the old barn on the site.

An enhanced version of a stereograph of Mother Johnson’s at Raquette Falls, taken by famous Adirondack photographer Seneca Ray Stoddard.

This photograph of Mother Johnson’s, held by the New York Public Library, is undated. A guess of the 1870s can’t be too far wrong, as the house is complete and fairly spacious, with what appears to be a fairly lavish extension to the left of what was likely the original cabin on the right.

The construction itself tells a story of progress even in the woods. Besides the barn, which can’t be seen in this view, it seems likely that the first structure built would have been what is now the lower story of the cabin, on the right. It appears to be of squared log construction, and may originally have had a peaked roof but not one as high as the one in this picture. To the left is a little windowed structure with a stovepipe sticking out . . . this could have been a separate smokehouse (possibly a sugaring shack, but given the forest it seems less likely). That structure was sided with rough boards, meaning there was at least a planing mill somewhere near. By the time the spacious second story was added to the original cabin, better wood was available, as it is sided with dimensional boards and the windows are handsomely trimmed. It’s impossible to say whether the windows were assembled nearby from glass imported from elsewhere in the state, or if the sashes were brought in as finished pieces, but those are double-hung touches of civilization, in contrast with the multi-paned fixed window at the end of what we’ll call the smokehouse.

Hand-hewn beam inside the barn at Raquette Falls. This dates to at least 1890.

As business expanded, and more and more swells from the city needed a place to stay on their passage up the river, the Johnsons must have decided to simply add on to their cabin. When the upper story wasn’t enough, they must have added on that extension to the left, which likely had spacious common space down below and a bunkroom up above. Someone had the wherewithal to make some pretty nice-looking wooden shingles, and it appears that another stove was in use in that part of the house.

The stovepipe shows that at some point the oxen carried a stove in to the cabin . . . but from where? The first railroad into any part of the Adirondacks, built by Durant, only reached North Creek in 1871, a long, long way from Raquette Falls. The Fulton Chain railway, famous as one of the most popular routes, wasn’t completed until 1892. Saranac Lake, down the Raquette River to the north, was reached by the Delaware and Hudson in 1887, and the New York Central in 1892. So clearly, someone hauled that stove the hard way, a long way. The windows appear to be glass, which raises the question of where the glass came from, and whether the windows were crafted somewhere locally with glass from one of New York’s far-off cities, or if they were brought in as completed sashes. The logistics are daunting today, and seem impossible in the 1870s. But there they were.

Standing under the little shingled roof next to the center post is the ample frame of a woman who must be Mother Johnson. To the left, her right, are two men or boys in the shadows. They could be guides, they could be hired hands. Immediately next to Mother Johnson could be a dog. To the right, there are three men. Any of these could be Philander, or they could just be other Adirondack guides or the swells they catered to.

On the way out, we were treated to a ride down the river, an unexpected bonus that made me desperate to get back there with my own boats and paddle the beautiful, slow winding path of the Raquette below the falls. Our guide explained how it had been perfect for logging operations – in the early days, nearly all timber was moved by river, and some rivers were friendlier to it (and the loggers) than others. Today, it is a slow, lovely bit of water with sandy banks surrounded by grassy plains. There are several inviting campsites and lean-tos that are beckoning for a future visit.

The wind has been howling around here lately, just howling, which has made for some trying bike rides. Last week happened to be a week when I had to bike commute all week, and so while the breeze was pleasant for its sweat-wicking qualities, it was a beast to fight on some of the rides home. And then I had a charity ride through the hills of beautiful northern Chester County, mostly in the same hills I normally ride anyway, but I went out on Friday just to get a few more hilly miles in the legs before Sunday’s event, and the wind was just a whirling beast that never seemed to give me a push. Thought for sure it would have settled down some by yesterday morning, but when we lined up for the 32-mile route, there was blazing sun, increasing heat, and a strong wind that seemed to be a headwind in every direction. At one point late in the ride, I was making a long, clear descent to a bridge, and as I sailed down the hill the landscape opened up and I could see that there was an amazing wind tunnel going across my path. I had to brake back my descent and barely kept upright as the wind swept across the road and showed me who was boss; if I hadn’t pulled back I’d have gone down. The rest of the ride, it was just a constant presence, particularly in the ears, as it was hard to hear anything and after a while I wondered if the noise would ever stop.

And then . . . coming down West Seven Stars Road, in a little stretch where the farm fields are banked up just a couple of feet above the road, I achieved something I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced before: a moment of perfect wind. That is to say, no wind, because I was entirely within the wind. As I flew down that little tunneled section of road, tucked in just low enough that there were no cross-currents, I must have been going along at exactly the same speed, in exactly the same direction, as the wind. All the grasses to my sides were flailing wildly. Birds were being pushed back as they tried to come up the road. And yet, I could feel nothing. And I could hear nothing. It was absolutely silent, still, perfect, all visual evidence to the contrary. It went on for what felt like an oddly long time though it could only have been 20 seconds, 25 seconds at most, long enough for me to realize I was experiencing a singularity. I could see the effect of the wind, yet I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t hear it. I sailed through the covered bridge and on the other side the world was back to normal and the wind was back to howling. But for just a few moments, I was part of the wind.